Shat terd

Shat terd

Men

The hidden half of domestic violence

A Letter To DART

Several hundred DART buses feature misleading, father-bashing ads purporting to address the serious issue of domestic violence. One ad depicts a happy little girl with the message "One day my husband will kill me." Another shows a smiling boy with the message "When I grow up, I will beat my wife."

This ad campaign is in conjunction with The Family Place however, much of what is being presented to the public in these ads is very misleading to say the least. Much of the statistics on the The Family Place website are distorted. These are but two of them that I will address:

The Surgeon General’s Workshop on Violence and Public Health reports that domestic violence is the number one cause of injury to women in the United States —more than rapes, muggings and auto accidents combined.

One often-cited study is a Journal of the American Medical Association study in a large urban hospital (Detroit). But a more recent JAMA-cited study found a virtually equal prevalence of domestic violence for male and female ED patients.

Only 1.85% of women's emergency room visits are due to domestic violence (37% of 5% - all forms of violence account for only 5% of ER visits.)

http://menweb.org/battered/batemerg.htm

http://shatterdmen.com/Guestbook.htm

According to the FBI, a woman is beaten in this country every 15 seconds.

There is absolutely no basis in fact for this statement. While it has become an often-used factoid (sometimes the number is 9 seconds, or six) it is not accurate. It is also variously reported as coming from the FBI, Department of Justice data, the UN, the Commonwealth Fund, or simply, "studies." The organizations referenced have never compiled data in this fashion or issued such a statement.

The original factoid (then 17 seconds) was extrapolated from information in this report by Murray Straus, which was compiled nearly twenty years ago and cannot have any relevance in a discussion of today's incidence of domestic violence.

If you choose to do your own extrapolation of this data, you will discover an incidence of 13 seconds also applies to males, a point which is conveniently left out of the factoid circulating today. Again, this study is so old, and society itself has changed so much it cannot be considered relevant in 2004.

Furthermore, the FBI does not calculate, tabulate, or track data on domestic violence.

A studyconducted by scientists at the Centers for Disease Control andPrevention (CDC). The lead investigator was Daniel Whitaker,Ph.D., a behavioral scientist and team leader at the NationalCenter for Injury Prevention and Control (which is part of theCDC). Results were published in the May Journal of Public Health.

Whitaker discovered, of the 24 percent of relationshipsthat had been violent, half had been reciprocal and half hadnot. Although more men than women (53 percent versus 49 percent)had experienced nonreciprocal violent relationships, more womenthan men (52 percent versus 47 percent) had taken part in onesinvolving reciprocal violence.

Regarding perpetration of violence, more women than men (25percent versus 11 percent) were responsible. In fact, 71 percentof the instigators in nonreciprocal partner violence were women.This finding surprised Whitaker and his colleagues, they admittedin their study report.

As for physical injury due to intimate partner violence, itwas more likely to occur when the violence was reciprocal thannonreciprocal. And while injury was more likely when violencewas perpetrated by men, in relationships with reciprocal violenceit was the men who were injured more often (25 percent of thetime) than were women (20 percent of the time). "This is important asviolence perpetrated by women is often seen as not serious,"Whitaker and his group stressed.

http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/42/15/31-a

All these ads will do is to instill fear into our children. Girls will be needlessly afraid of boys and boys will develop a low self esteem and have all hope stolen from them. This does not help stop the violence, it will increase it because it only looks at ONE SIDE! When society depicts that only men are the abuser, we enable women to be abusive as they will not seek help for abusing their spouse or their children as they will not see it as abuse. If they do, they may not seek help since they may fear they are the only woman who is abusive and will thus feel like a freak.

If we do not look at both sides of this issue, we will only make the problem worse. More women are being harmed by the VAWA and its one sided approach then are being helped. Why is it so hard to realize that girls can learn how to abuse from their mothers just as well as boys can from their fathers? Even worse, they also learn they can get away with it.

We need to encourage each person who realizes they may have violent tendencies to seek help before it becomes a crime. We can only do this by honestly presenting the real information on domestic abuse and encouraging personal and accountability from both men and women, not just from the men.

VAWA: Harmful To Women?
Has VAWA Delivered on its Promises to Women?

There are some resources you can check:

http://www.mediaradar.org/

RADAR Special Reports

Effects of VAWA

· Threat to Families

· VAWA Discriminates Against Male Victims

· Abuse of Domestic Restraining Orders

· Justice Denied: Arrest Policies for DV

· Bias in the Judiciary

· A Culture of False Allegations

· Has VAWA Delivered on its Promises to Women?